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I have recently played the game Cities Skylines with a mod called "OverLayer". This mod is supposed to overlay images on the game world to allow modelling following existing real maps for example.

I have loaded a large image into the mod, the png has about 15kx15k pixels, 24bit. This would probably require some up to one GB of RAM to load. But it makes the game crash. not only the game, it actually takes some other applications down with it. So I think this app is actually overwriting other apps memory. When I watch the systems memory consumption, it never looks like it consumes all available RAM, there is definitely enough of it, the system has 32GB ram. It never hits the limit, at least not in taskman or resmon. I was under the assumption that in a windows host you can allocate memory only through the OS functions, and symptoms like this should not happen. Do I have to correct my concepts?

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    Windows will prevent an application from modifying a other process’s address space but will not prevent an application from using any memory it wants. Remember virtual memory is still a thing. You have not identified the source of your issue
    – Ramhound
    Sep 13, 2020 at 21:59
  • but if other applications memory is protected, how comes that other applications are corrupted? I have seen cases where Chrome tabs are completely malfunctioning, not even the "ow snap" screen shown. Other apps are plainly closed without notices. Explorer becomes unresponsive.
    – Kai
    Sep 13, 2020 at 22:12
  • Probably due to Windows denying them memory that was critically needed. You should provide the log files for those applications that crashed. Based on what you have provided, I would have to speculate on the reason those applications crashed, which wouldn’t be helpful to anyone. Please provide the required information necessary to properly answer your question
    – Ramhound
    Sep 13, 2020 at 22:16
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    If you are using a texture size far larger than is supported by the drivers you could be crashing the GPU driver that would reside in the kernel virtual memory space, that could corrupt the driver itself or put the GPU into an inconsistent state that the driver can't recover from. That would mean that other programs using those same routines find the GPU in an invalid state and so crash as well. Virtual memory protects things from each other, but you still have to go through the drivers and kernel to use the hardware.
    – Mokubai
    Sep 13, 2020 at 22:21
  • Hi, Mokubai, I'm running it on a RTX2080TI with 11GB...
    – Kai
    Sep 16, 2020 at 6:21

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Depending on what the mod and game are doing it could be causing a crash or hitting a bug in some other library or GPU routine and causing a different subsystem to fail.

Virtual memory might protect one process from another, but taking down or crashing shared system resources such as the GPU can take down other programs as well.

Crashing hardware drivers which operate in the kernel virtual memory space means crashing anything that uses those drivers.

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